


time's arrows

by nannerlinthejungle



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Colour-Coded, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Reverse Chronology, i don't know how romance works i am literally a disaster aro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27864898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nannerlinthejungle/pseuds/nannerlinthejungle
Summary: //; four people, six tangos, eighteen nights: maybe the end was written right from the beginning.
Relationships: Catherine de Valois Queen of England/Henry V of England, Catherine de Valois Queen of England/Owain ap Maredudd ap Tewdwr | Owen Tudor, Henry V of England/Montjoy (Henry V)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 45
Collections: Histories Ficathon XI





	time's arrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pelican_in_its_piety](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelican_in_its_piety/gifts).



> **Conversation in quote-unquote** : happens in the scene.  
>  **Conversation in different indentation** : vague, might or might not had happened sometime before the scene.  
> ( make sure you're using my work skin )

Halfway through the staircase, Catherine knew she'd replay the whole morning in reverse. She thought perhaps she should have arrived much earlier to bid him goodbye. Or a bit later. Or that she shouldn't have come at all. The silence that rose between them as quickly as steam from a sprinkled clump of dry ice lately made it clear that neither had anything to add and that they both wanted the subject swept aside by whatever means. If she were shouting the truth, or if they knew what would happen next, she knew he wouldn't blame her. He would've been glad she made the choice she made. She was angry. She wanted him to envy her, perhaps because she needed another’s gaze to help her look more kindly on her life and not see that, like so many left over people in this world, she too was reduced to slumming. Perhaps she wanted to prove to him, and to herself through him, that she hadn’t sunk so low, that however privileged her life had once been, she had found ways to put it behind her now and discovered, if not a new home, at least a new place in the world that could, to anyone who didn’t know better, pass for a baronial estate. She could never allow herself to think this was a home, because she knew that the precarious smidgen of privilege that this place doled out to people like her could, at a moment’s notice and with little more than a few scratches, be readily taken away. Clearly he would have be furious about it too. He'd tell her: _I have to hold these things together and feel them both, all._

>   
>  _Do we love each other?_   
>  _Yes, I like you, now don't ask again._

_The difficult word_ : where everything started, where they always returned. _The difficult word_. Its lack. The possibility of it.

He was leaving again. Of course he'd be back. He always did. He had more reason to come back after this one because his yet to be born child would greet him home. They exchanged looks. Gestures. Some words that don't need to be repeated. But she wanted to say more. Something. Anything. She wanted to tell him to take her name to her homeland and whisper it to himself and come back to it and see if crystals haven't sprouted around it. Take her name. Take her name. Take her.

But instead, she only said, “Come back to me.” and there was reassurance in his eyes that seemed to say: _of course, why wouldn't I?_ Had he really said it, Catherine imagined it would've had intoned with the self-mocking strain of people who have ventured too far but who, to smooth ruffled waters, were merely pretending to be unhinged by their boldness. It didn't occur to her soon enough that people who bolt into her life could easily bolt out of it when they were done. But she said what she'd said. That was her contribution. Her signature to the day. Her twisted reading of a plain farewell gesture.

* * *

They never said it but both Henry and Montjoy were glad that they almost always saw each other when they were in a big group, brushed off as just someone in the crowd among the rotating faces that came in and out: his brothers, people who had things to say, anyone. It worked that way because if they were alone first, Montjoy wouldn't be sure how he could cover the fact that he was transfixed by Henry. He had always been. By the voice, the person, by his own total failure to master the situation, by the pleasure he felt in being so easily swept over, helpless, clueless. Watching Henry didn't just feel like watching something leaked away out of his body. It seemed to tear things out of Montjoy's, like an ancient admission. It worked that way because Montjoy didn't want to dispel the illusion or undo the thrill of the likelihood on running into him. He wanted to hold on to that illusion and, like a well-behaved Orpheus determined to keep his end of the bargain, he wanted to think that Henry had already seen him and was just waiting for the right time on making his way toward Montjoy, provided Montjoy didn't look back. He wanted to cup his hands around this tiny, furtive, shameful hope as if all he had to do then was look away, keep looking away, and so long as he kept up with the pretense, Henry would find the right time to come behind him.

* * *

She couldn't remember a time when she wasn't setting her story against his. It had so little to do with him, actually, and more that it was her survival from the very beginning. She felt the sense of being self-invented because she had to be. Maybe the women before her felt the same too. Maybe they didn't. But as she looked around, she noticed that there was an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of her life that started out long after she was born. A crucial part of her story was gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. She felt hurt, exposed, embittered, embarrassed, like a crawfish whose shell has been slit with a lancet and removed but whose bared, gnarled body was being held out for everyone to see before being thrown back naked into the water to be laughed at and shamed by its peers. She should have known that the triumph in her avowal wouldn’t last. Something sharp and unkind in the rise of their conversation came like two fingertips snuffing the candlelit amity she’d just found in his voice. Irony, which she loved and found comfort in and which had drawn them together from the very start and made Catherine think they were two lost souls adrift in a shallow, flat-footed world. On the other hand, Henry didn’t know why he bothered to do this over and over again. There were so many flaws in every version of it. Because he had never known anyone like Catherine or been this way with anyone, never this close, or this exposed. Never like this. They didn't know why they were telling each other all these lies, because chances were they would never forgive each other. 

>   
>  _Of course I love you._   
>  _And someone else._   
>  _You talk as if it were an incurable disease._   
>  _Perhaps it was an incurable disease._   
>  _I am the one who is suffering._   
>  _My feelings for you have never changed._   
>  _How can you keep alive what is caught in its own death?_   
>  _Would you prefer I spoke in numbers?_   
>  _Stop it._   
>  _Or not at all?_   
>  _Men and women are different._   
>  _You think I don't desire other people?_   
>  _Who?_   
>  _Does it matter? I don't sleep with them because I love you._

* * *

The more he resisted turning in Henry's direction, the more Montjoy could feel his breath graze the back of his neck, closer and closer, the way Henry had let his lips almost touch Montjoy's ears each time he'd whisper to Montjoy. There was something so enthralling about waiting and hoping, without so much as giving a hint he knew he was being watched, that he even caught himself trying not to hope so much, realising all along that this sobering strain of counterhope was not just his way of seeing that life seldom grant them what it knew they want, but also his own twisted way of courting its goodwill by pretending to forget it liked nothing better than to grant them their wish once they've all but given up and embraced despair.

Hope and counterhope. In between both options he was instantly rummaging for things to say, for an attitude to strike: hide the joy, show the joy, show he was hiding the joy, show he was showing every last strain of joy. But then, because the things he thought he'd say thrilled him and seemed to blanket the evening around him, he suddenly caught himself wanting to undo the thrill himself rather than have others do it for him. Perhaps, he began to think, it was just as well this way.

He couldn't think of the lithe and flowing with movement as a bony ridge, musical instruments bore the same root. If he pushed his fingers into the recesses behind the bone, he'd find Henry like a soft shell crab. He'd find the openings between the springs of muscles where he could press himself into the chord of Henry's neck. The bone ran in perfect scale from sternum to scapula. Felt lathe turned. Why should a bone be balletic anyway. But what he wanted to was to fasten his index finger and thumb at the bolts of Henry's collar bone, push out, spreading the web of his hand until it caught against his throat. A game of fitting bone on bone. Bone of his bone. Flesh of his flesh. To remember Henry, it was his own body he touched. Thus Henry was, here and here. The physical memory blundered through the doors the mind had tried to seal. A skeleton key to a secret chamber. The bloody key that unlocked pain. Wisdom said forget, the body howled. The bolts of Henry's collar bone undo him.

Part of him still groped for reasons not to be taken in, not to believe. So, what was the feeling, and where was it coming from? Why did hearing him talk or staring at the features of his face made him want to live under its spell, close to Henry's heart, below his heart? That small pendant, he wanted it in his mouth.

* * *

Sometimes she felt like she exploded into an unknown world that was only knowable through some kind of a story, which was how everyone lived but this dropped her into the story after it had started, arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something was missing never, ever left her. And it couldn't, and it shouldn't, because something was missing. Catherine closed her eyes, pulled herself until she was completely underwater, as as she held her breath a thought crossed her mind. It was her husband. The idea of her husband, at least. He was interesting. Not for what he knew or for what he said or for who he was, even, but for he saw and twisted things. For the implied, complicit jeer in his voice. For how he seemed to both admire and put you down so that you didn't know whether he had the sensibility of gleaming velvet or of sandpaper. He was interesting, in an intelligent way, but would someone less intelligent be harder to live with or easier? Logic and intelligence weren't linked with generosity and empathy. Or where they? Not his intelligence, anyway. He was a literal, linear, intellectual thinker. How did this make thirty or forty or fifty years together more appealing? More interesting?

But interesting was not the word she wanted. What was it that he contain, really? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in his gut. _Are you sixteen feet of intestines loaded with stars, Henry?_

She rose up from under the water, inhaled the air, and that very word struggled to be heard when it finally came to her. Spilled out so naturally, so effortlessly, and in a manner so uninhibited that she felt no less bashful when she opened her eyes and was met with a pair that wasn't Henry's. They'd say nothing, and everything. Said nothing because the two of them were perfectly ready to say there was indeed nothing: what they've done, how sinister their joys, how shallow their crafty roundabouts, which cheated them of their very own life and made them live quite another; what they've done, singing in the wrong key, saying things in the wrong tense, and in a language that spoke to everyone they knew but moved them not a whit.

>   
>  _Why didn't you come last night?_   
>  _Because I picked up resentment in your voice._   
>  _Why didn't you say something, then?_   
>  _Because I knew you were angry and there'd be more double-talk._   
>  _What double-talk?_   
>  _This double-talk._   
>  _Can I tell you something, then?_   
>  _Don't you think I know already, don't you think I know?_   
> _Oh, Catherine, Catherine, Catherine. _

* * *

It didn't take long to realise that what he was feeling was not just admiration. Nor was it awe or envy. Worship. Montjoy thought: _I could worship people like him_. Because part of him was already venturing into an amorphous terrain. Because in the busy crowded room, as Montjoy listened to him talk, the one sprightly roguish that was the ability to draw ever so close to meanness without being cruel, he found himself toying with a word so overused and hackneyed. So safe that Montjoy was tempted to ignore it. It threw him off a bit, made him rethink things. Was he once again mistaken about Henry? Was he perhaps just cruel, and nothing less? Or did Montjoy like running into his presumed cruelty only to have an instance of kindness brighten up his face like compassion on the features of a stern inquisitor?

For now, he said nothing. Said nothing because he was aching to tell the world but fear no one could possibly understand, but if they did understand, then there'd be nothing special to understand in the first place, would there? Say nothing because he didn't want to see where hope trailed off and lost luster and like a lumpy bolide tail spinning to earth, finally thumped down on the desolate dark folds. Because to vow himself to someone else was to open a wound. From it blood flew freely, life of him to them. They called it the dying Christ. The Fisher King's wound became him and would not heal. The vow of him to him would've been as red vulnerability on a grey shuttered world. Monstrous, primitive, grand, divine, the one true extravagant gesture. Said nothing, smile, and move on.

* * *

She was freed from the world of double meanings. “If I wait,” It was one of those nights when they were hidden, forgotten behind one of these walls. Owen had held her hand a touch longer than was usual, to say he had gotten the message, but let it go sooner than warranted, fearing he'd invented the message. “Would you leave?” something almost helpless and modest in his voice. He had used the exact same tone each night they were together, lacing, as he always seemed to do in difficult moments, straight talk with double-talk, bland-speak with sad-speak. But this time he wasn't saying it about himself or about his reclusion from those around him; he was saying it to Catherine, staving her off. As he said it, it was clear that he was stalking love. Trapping love. Losing love. Longing for love. She knew he had left out something from his question, its silent twin, because he couldn't say it. Because it would've been too painful. This was how he could still hope that he at least would've soothe the rest, or appease it in some way.

“Why do you ask?”  
“So I know if there's an end to this.”

There were markings in Owen's words, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. His words sounded almost like a dare. She was supposed to grow up, knew her place in a strictly three-dimensional world, but instead she fell in love with a wrong man. Disaster. It was like being pinned between someone who liked to watch wrestling and the one who liked to wrestle. Yet, she sat there and felt like her shuffling feet were already sinking underground, saying: _you shouldn't be here , why have you left, why are you here?_ She was here to think whether she should go back or stay here instead.

And?

And she didn't know. Even here in this private place her syntax had fallen prey. The door was open, even when she didn't exactly open it herself. He opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said: _Boredom, fetch me a plaything_ and he put on his gloves and he tapped at her heart and she thought he said his name was Love.

“I love you,” She said in a flash, as the most obvious fact in the world, as though he should've known it all along. It didn't seem like he acknowledged it, or perhaps Owen was trying not to, so she continued. “As much as I'm capable of loving you.” It put a face to a word everyone had surely uttered many times before. “Which is never enough.”

She hoped he'd ask one day, when none of this mattered: _why did you leave that night?_ Because she was angry. Because she grew to hate herself. Because she didn't know what to do. She didn't want to sit quietly and go on struggling with him. With _him_ , too. She was losing both, and watching the loss unfold before her unleashed more bitterness yet, because they seemed determined to speed up its course. She felt ridiculous, weak, ineffectual. She was inhibiting impulses that had nothing wrong with them, then held these very same inhibitions against him. _Him_ , too.

* * *

Some time later that week, Montjoy told Henry that he was glad that he didn't know everything. It put him at the safe distance and maybe they weren't supposed to know all the answers. All he knew feeling at that moment was a pang of something he could never name, because it hovered between unbearable shame and unbearable sorrow. Never had he sunk so low in his life.

>   
>  _I'll try to come tomorrow. _  
>  _There may not be a tomorrow._   
> _ There you go again. You watch, you'll outlive us all. _

And yet, no sooner had he felt this burst of shame than it was immediately relieved by an exhilarating sense of lightness he hadn't felt in such a long time: freedom, joy, space, as though an oppressive worry, which had been haunting and weighing and gnawing at him for months, had suddenly been lifted. Saying that he didn't know everything was soaring. He told Henry he didn't know everything because on impulse Montjoy wanted to seek him out and tell him about this strange, uplifting feeling as if it were a startling revelation about a person they both knew, or a truth about human nature that he couldn't wait to share, because Henry, of all people, understood all about questioning these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul. Questions were good. They were better than answers. Life, work, progress, it was questions that were important. Questions were good. Questions made him feel less lonely and more connected. It wasn't always about knowing. He'd hope the other one would appreciate not knowing. Not knowing was human, that was how it should've been: unsolvable; dark, but not entirely.

* * *

Something was missing yet that wasn't of its nature negative. Slowly she picked up the signs that it could be an opening instead of a void. An entry as well as an exit. Fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although she could never have that life, her fingers trace the space where it might have been. Double negatives. Future anterior. Past conditionals.

What was all this, Catherine?

Nothing. It was nothing. Just counterfactual things from her counterfactual life.

She had a lover. She was also a happily married woman. One of the things that drew Catherine to Owen at first had nothing to do with his look, or his survivor’s instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around her until he choked her before he turned into laughter. Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to her. For all his dislodged, nomadic life, he was of this planet, while she was never sure she belonged to it. He loved earth and understood people. Jostle him all you wanted, he would find his bearings soon enough, whereas she, without moving, was always out of place, forever withdrawn. If she seemed grounded, it was only because she didn’t budge. He was temporarily unhinged yet forever on the prowl; she was permanently motionless. If she moved at all, she did so like a straddler standing clueless on a wobbly raft in the rapids; the raft moved, the water moved, but she did not. She envied him. She wanted to learn from him. He was the voice, the missing link to her past, the person she might have grown up to be had life taken a different turn. He was savage; she’d been tamed, curbed.

>   
>  If one has a heart to plunder, to be the wrong sort of king, I suppose a castle is what you need. I suppose if you want so much more than any man or woman has a right to, then you need tall walls of stone for your castle and your mind. I imagine these people are lonely behind such rocky towers, paranoid as they fill their world with weapons, each as deadly as the last sin they inflicted on the less powerful. How they preach, those greedy ones who sit and guzzle, taking whatever and whomever they please. Yes. I can see why they would need to live in a building such as that. Grand and empty, dank with small windows and surrounded by their own filth. It's just perfect.

People like them didn’t feel a thing. How could they? All their sensation came from deeper down, the live places where the dermis was renewing itself, making another armadillo layer. Rescued her. Swung her up beside _him_ , let him hold on to her, arms around her waist, head nodding against her back. His smell soothed her to sleep, she could bury herself in the warm goose-down of his body. His skin tasted salty and slightly citrus. When she ran her tongue in a long wet line across his chest she can feel the tiny hairs, the puckering of the aureole, the cone of his nipple. His chest were beehives pouring honey. She was a creature who fed at his hand. She would be the squire rendering excellent service. Rest now, let her unlace his boots, massage his feet where the skin was calloused and sore. There was nothing distasteful about him to her; not sweat nor grime, not disease and its dull markings. Put his foot in her lap and she would ease the tightness of a long day. It had been a long day for him to find her. He was bruised all over. Burst figs were the livid purple of his skin.

Perhaps he was a stand-in for who Catherine expected Henry was, a primitive version of the the king she’d lost track of. The shadow self, mad brother in the tower, a very, very rough draft. Man unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished; untrammeled, enraged; without books, without finish, endless. She began to feel like they were crewing a sinking carriage. They couldn't tell their friends, at least she couldn't tell hers because some of them were his too. And they sank lower and lower in their love-lined lead-lined coffin. Body light as a dragonfly, great gold wings once cut across the sun. Telling the truth was a luxury they couldn't afford and so lying became a virtue, an economy to practise. Simple, solid, confined love affair. A commonality of life as dependable as life itself. They were what they knew. They knew what they were.

But she remembered their first night, or the second, or the third, or the night when she came back and stood dazed here after their kiss and could feel everything rise in her chest each time she looked over. She remembered the smells of her lover's body were still strong in her nostrils. The yeast smell of his sex. She remembered how he'd kissed her, their hips pressed together, heeding an impulse she thought she'd been following all this time when in fact, she'd been rehearsing it just for Owen. As everything was rehearsal, and deferral.

Did she want them to stay together, or was this one of those bland, mushy-gushy relationships that spilled over into passion one evening when they'd both had too much piled up inside them. _Tell me again, you sweet, bitter stoneheart ; tell me again, did you wish that time stopped for you as well? Am I making sense to you?_ She knew that voice among millions.

* * *

It felt like Henry had known Montjoy longer than he had. Couldn't put a number into it, yet he should've known exactly. They had a real connection, a rare and intense attachment. They could do small things together, but were small, critical actions enough? Small gestures made them feel good, about themselves, about others. Small things connected them. They felt like everything. A lot depended on them. It was not unlike religion and God. People believed in certain constructs that helped them understand life. Not only to understand it, but as a means of providing comfort.

>   
>  _It's just one of those misunderstood things._   
>  _But you think getting old is good?_   
> _I do. It is. First of all, it's inevitable. It just seems negative because of overwhelming obsession with youth._  
>  _I know. They're all positives. But what about your boyish good looks? You can kiss those farewell. Are you prepared to be fat and bald?_   
>  _Whatever we lose physically as we age is worth it, given what we gain. It's a fair trade-off._   
>  _Right. I'm with you, I actually want to be older. I'm happy to age._   
>  _I keep hoping for some gray hairs. Some wrinkles. I'd like to have some laugh lines. I guess, more than anything, I want to be myself._   
>  _How so?_   
>  _I want to understand myself. How I reach that is almost less important, is it not? It means something to get to the next year. It's significant._

He turned to Montjoy when the rotating faces started to become quite unbearable. He needed to get out of here. What was supposed to be a brief noon break turned into an evening walk that didn't end until everything turned dark.

“You know that point in your life when you realise that the place that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore?”  
“Would you elaborate on that?”  
“Just some thoughts.”

He answered with nothing. But Montjoy had learned to read between the lines when it came to Henry. He learned to see behind the image. This wasn't his thought. “All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can rest your head at, that idea of home is gone.” It took Montjoy a while to understand what the near-imperceptible lilt in his voice meant when he said that

“Are we talking about England?”  
“I don't know. Does home really have to be a tangible place?”  
“By definition, yes.”  
“It's the loneliness, see. Whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.”

Montjoy listened. Even then he couldn't help but think that the sun was in Henry's mouth. “I cannot relate to that.” His respond was sincere and contributed nothing. Montjoy knew better than to start arguing the point. His gesture had come too easily, carried no risk, no obligation, no scruple, no hesitation or difficulty to overcome. He knew the difference between a good deed and instant charity tossed like a cheap coin on a salver. The conversation about loneliness ended there. "Sometimes I wonder why I can't speak like you."

“Want to know why?”  
“Dying to know why.”  
“It's very simple, Montjoy. You don't trust me.”  
“Why don't I trust you? Tell me.”  
“Really, really want me to tell you?”  
“Yes.”  
“Because you know I can hurt you.”  
“And you know this for a fact?”

Henry nodded. Montjoy asked why and he shrugged his shoulders to mean: _God knows_.

* * *

“Do we love each other, Kate?” Henry once asked, it sprung like a tentative conversation opener: meek, seemingly assertive, overly casual, distant, aired as an afterthought. It sounded like the verbal equivalent of kissing someone's hand that had learned to convey firmness and vigor by overexerting an otherwise limp and lifeless grip.

It had taken Catherine a long time to learn how to love, both the giving and the receiving, and maybe the other person thought the same too. Obsessively. Forensically. Knew it as the highest value. He loved God, of course, and God loved her. That was something. They loved certain animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

“I think,” She had no idea. “At least for me,” She thought that love was loss. “I don't know where you are.” Later, not soon enough, would she realise how much this conversation required effort that it left her drained and almost grateful when he failed to pick up the cue. He felt with forked heart, and his heart was a muted organ. He bled the smells she knew changed colour. There was iron in his soul on those days. Her husband was cocked and ready to fire. He had the scent of his prey on him. He consumed when he came in thin white smoke smelling of saltpetre. Shot against him all they wanted were the last wreaths of his desire that carried from the base of him to olfactory nerves.

“What do you mean?” Henry asked, and Catherine sensed something creeping back into her mind. The damage was coming. The damage that she had to undo over and over again which was their love: it had lost its warmth, its spontaneity, and become a willed, conscious, rueful love. The damage where Henry was pleased to see Catherine still loved him; Catherine was pleased to see how readily both she and Henry were fooled. The damage where two of them were aware of being pleased, which intensified their truce, but they must have sensed that being so easily reassured was nothing more than a dilution of their love. The damage where they hugged and kissed each other more often, and wanted to be hugged and kissed more often, and the damage where Catherine could tell, from the way Henry looked at her when he thought Catherine wasn’t looking, that he didn’t trust it either.

Henry was cocked and ready to fire. But this was worse than fire. It scorched everything in its wake. Suddenly, she saw her life and where it was headed. She felt like somebody who wake up in the middle of the night and, under cover of darkness, found that most of the defenses normally in place by daylight have deserted her like the poor, underpaid, straggling porters they were. The monsters she tamed by day were untethered, belching dragons, and before her, she suddenly saw—like someone who opened a window in the middle of the night and looked out at the unfamiliar view overlooking an emptied village—how bleak and mirthless her life had been, how it was always missed its mark and cut corners at every turn, straying like a ghost ship from harbor to haven without ever stopping at the one port she had always known was home, because, in the middle of this fateful night, she suddenly realises something else as well: that the very thought of home turned out to be little else than stop gap, everything was stop gap, even thinking was stop gap, as were truth, and joy, and lovemaking, and the words themselves she tried to land on her feet with each time she felt the ground slip from under her—stop gap, each one.

“Whenever I see you, I don't think you're truly there.” Catherine said again, after sizing up her intentionally blank gaze that hadn’t fooled him. “But at least this place lets you play your game.” Henry was so full of other, more surprising turns that it was pointless to keep up with any or try to second-guess them, or put up a struggle against someone who, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuaded Catherine he was inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable. With unsettling reminders, though, that Henry's ability to flip from one to the other was what ultimately made him deadly.

“I'm here with you,” He said, as if he wanted to say: _am I making sense to you?_ “Ain't I?” _Am I what you want? Before you changed your mind? _Because it seemed like he wanted to say: _I've never changed mine._

Say that it could be true, this simple obvious message, why then did they never stop to eagerly read out what wasn't there. And yet Catherine knew he was there. Here. Sprung like a genie to ten times his natural size. Towering over her. Holding her in his arms like mountain sides. Eyes blazing as if to say: _make three wishes and they shall all come true; make three hundred and I will honour every one._

“You're never really with me, Henry. And I take no offense because you do that with everybody.”

* * *

“I don't always think I'm a good person. But telling people this only makes them want to prove me wrong, and the more they try to prove me wrong, the more I want to push them away, but the more I push them away, the guiltier I get, the nicer I become, the more they think I've changed. It never lasts. In the end I learn to hate both myself and them for things that should have lasted no longer than a few hours.”  
“This is the most twisted thing you've said so far.”  
“What, that being kind to people makes me want to hurt them? Or that hurting them makes me want to be kind?”  
“Both. I won't ask you why you're telling me all this, though.”  
“Perhaps my hell is having to say all and not knowing if I should be quiet instead, and yours, unless I'm all wrong, is to listen and not know whether I mean it. But let me put this on the table, but you can't raise me, okay?”

So typical. Montjoy nodded.

“I once said you don't trust me. And I'm sure you have your reasons, and I won't ask what they are. But I also know you: you'll never ask me what we're doing here together. And one day you're going to have to.”  
“And when that day comes?”

He pursed his lips, gave another wistful shrug of his shoulders, said nothing.

“Ambivalence, huh?”

Henry looked at Montjoy with something like gratitude in his gaze. “You're uh,” He trailed off before picking it up again. “What's the word I'm looking for?”

“A temperance?”  
“Bland.”

Henry was learning to disbelieve that this could last another five minutes, because this had all the makings of an unreal, spellbound interlude, when things open up far too easily and seem willing to let them into the otherwise closed circle that was none other than their very own life, their life as they've always craved to live but cheat it at each turn, finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense, in a language that spoke to them and was right for them and them alone, their life finally made real and luminous.

“I don't mind being unimpressive, I sleep better.” Montjoy replied, it was neither bold nor intrusive, but spoken with the practiced wry smile of someone who had said it too many times to care how it broke the silence. Strained, indifferent, weary, and amused. At himself. At Henry. At life for making conversation like this the tense, self-conscious things they were. It created the illusion of intimacy, of a friendship briefly interrupted and urgently resumed.

Then, a thought crossed Henry's mind when he connected the dots in his head: the question, his answer, him, they. It occurred to Henry that what stood before him now like a stranger he thought he recognised was _the difficult word_. The return, or rather the returning, named the lost loss. Henry couldn't smash the ice that separated him from himself, he could only let it melt and that meant losing all firm foothold. All sense of ground. It meant a chaotic merging with what felt like utter craziness.

Looking back, perhaps he was aware that Catherine found him hard to read. Warm and wary. What was making him wary? What was he wary of? He didn't know. There was a big gap between their lives. She was upset about his world, yet he would rather be this him—the him that he had become—than the him he might have become that have happened to him along the way. Yet, he failed to say something about it without dismissing or undervaluing things for her. And he didn't know what he felt about her. He panicked when his feelings were not clear. It was like staring into a muddy pond and rather than wait until an ecosystem develiped to clear the water, he'd prefer to drain the pond. And this wasn't a head/heart split or a thinking/feeling split; it was emotional matrix. He could juggle different and opposing ideas and realities easily but he hated feeling more than one thing at once. This, everyting, was so many things at once. And it was everything and nothing. These were people in his lives that he didn't know at all. Here he tried to avoid the miserable binary of 'this means so much to me/this means nothing to me'. He was trying to respect his own complexity: the story of his beginnings while accepting that this was a version too. True story, but it was still a version.

All his life he had worked from the wound. Child that was both healing and a cut. Place of lost and found. He once thought he had to sever some part of himself to let what he could've become go. He had felt the wound ever since. He had been surrounded, sometimes by his own choice, by people who were such mix of truth and fraud. They invented many bad adults for him; fallen men, addicts, melancholics, chasers. It was the stories of disguise and of naming and knowing that interest him. How were you recognised. How did you recognise yourself.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus, for all his adventures and far-flung wandering, was always urged to remember the return. The journey was about coming home. When he reached Ithaca the place was in uproar with unruly suitors for his hard-pressed wife. Two things happened: his dog scented him; and his wife recognised him by the scar. She felt the wound. The Fisher King was the keeper of the Grail and was sustained by it, but he had a wound that would not heal and until it did, the kingdom couldn't be united. Eventually Gallahad came and laid hands on the King. In other versions it was Percival. The wound was symbolic and couldn't be reduced to any single interpretation but wounding seemed to be a clue or a key to being human. There was value here as well as agony. Flung out, there was always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. He was working from the blood-trail wound. Towards the people who come on to him with friction. Chafing started intimacy; and strife, like spite, was the shortest distance to the heart, and he thought, here he was: lost and found.

* * *

If Catherine wasn't careful, he'd cut her. She'd slip her hand too casually down the sharp side of his scapula and she would lift away a bleeding palm. She knew the stigmata of presumption. The wound that wouldn't heal if she took him for granted. Nail her to him. She would ride him like a nightmare. He was the winged horse who would not be saddled. Strain under her. She wanted to see his muscle skein flex and stretch. Such innocent triangles holding hidden strength. Don't rear at her with unfolding power. She feared him in their bed when she put out her hand to touch him and felt the twin razors turned towards her. He slept with his back towards her so that she would know the full extent of her. It was sufficient.

>   
>  _Do you miss home? _  
>  _Why would you ask?_   
> _ Do you think I shouldn't? _  
>  _It's complicated._

It was flattering to believe that him and only him, the great lover, could have done this. That without him, the marriage, incomplete though it was, pathetic in many ways, would have thrived on its meagre diet and if not thrived at least not shrivelled. It had shrivelled, lies limp and unused, the shell of a marriage, its inhabitants both fled. Shells. Blown into the hollows where you've left cracking too severe to mend that you'd turn the bad part to the shade.

Oftentimes, she thought to explain what she had hoped to do. She was married to an ambitious man and neither of them see the point of being anything. Not anything at all if one had no ambition. She thought of explaining things in a way that allowed her to get away from the received idea of what was expected from her. Away from the compass of what the wives knew, bold and wide. She told him that she was here and suddenly, anything prior to this was gone. Not forgotten, just nonexistent. And she could never get it back. How could you get homesick for a place that didn't exist? And see, there was a script to this. She'd say this. And that. And he'd reply: _in that case, I'll make this a home to you_. She didn't say anything back. And he reached for her hand. If anything could have made physical contact between them meant so little, this was it. Had they reached perfunctory touching already? Or was this her/his way of reminding her/him that after last night, there were no more holds barred?

* * *

When they returned, Montjoy walked with Henry to his chamber and as if both of them needed an invitation to step in, they stood at the hallway like people who stumbled upon a dead end on their way but too prideful to admit they got lost.

“Be careful.”  
“I am careful.”  
“Right, because you know what you're doing _here_.”

 _You know what I mean_ , Montjoy didn't say. Obviously this was his way of acknowledging without really responding to another hasty attempt at bridging the distance between them. It slipped between them like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with. Then there was silence. A kind of exercised control that left a gap in which they hoped that the silences would be heard by someone else so the story could continue, be retold.

“When are we going to stop speaking in code?”

“Would you rather I spoke in your tongue?” Montjoy asked back. He knew not to bustle in nor to skip tedious steps, but there was a touch of crisis and commotion in his question that wasn't unwelcome or completely unintended. Henry gave a look, and the other man took it as a no. “You know you can't get rid of me, right?” Because for Montjoy he was the one thing he could always come back to each time he'd want to think of him: alert, warm, caustic, and dangerous.

“So you'll stay.” It was a question, a hopeful one, disguised as a statement. It suited Henry. He was revealing another, deeper side to remind Montjoy that everything he'd thought about Henry so far might be mistaken. Caustic had a meeker side. Dangerous could turn apprehensive and tenderhearted.

“I think I know enough of what I might get myself into if I follow you.”  
"Right, the circumstance doesn't give you much options."  
" _You_ don't give me much options, but I'm afraid I have yet to made up my mind nonetheless."  
"So this is uncomfortable for you?"

The _this_ was them, Montjoy presumed.

There was something savage and cruel in Henry question, as though he was striking back at something Montjoy said that had offended him. But it also seemed that all he wanted was to expose Montjoy, to expose him for the sheer, perverse pleasure of doing so. His six clipped words _so this is uncomfortable for you?_ were a straight indictment of everything Montjoy was; they made him feel like a slithery trickster who should be punished for beating around the bush when he'd already been warned to stay off the grass. And yet Montjoy knew he was right. Henry had seen through him and zeroed in on the one thing he feared most: the awkwardness that sprang up between them each time he looked him in the eye and made it so difficult to speak to him or find the courage not to deny that awkwardness did indeed exist between them. Montjoy didn't even want him to see how easily he blushed the instant he felt he'd strayed from indirect speech. Was he hiding desire? Or that he didn't feel he deserved to desire?

Why had Henry ever asked him this? To unsaddle him even more, in case Montjoy presumed too much? To egg him on, if Montjoy presumed too little? To rob the moment of its luster? To bring out the truth? To make Montjoy doubt everything about them? Or, as Montjoy was perfectly willing to accept, was all this taking place in his head only? Montjoy looked at him. He knew he could risk everything by saying something marginally wanton or clever. The Henrys of this world seldom give men second chances. Say the wrong thing and they were gone. Say nothing and they were equally gone. Henry said something again:

“Now this is getting really gauche.”  
“You mean my silence?”  
“I meant your staring. But the silence too.”  
“Let's change the subject, then,”  
“And run away? No, talk to me about uncomfortable-ness. I want to learn.”

But Montjoy might have overestimated it. Or maybe he knew what he was saying. No one knew. This didn't last long enough for either one of them to find out. Henry looked straight ahead. From where he stood, Henry filled the space, strangely enough was out of scale, larger than life. Approximate yet unstable; loomed up; expanded. Only much, much later, too late, did Montjoy understand how small he was to himself.

“Maybe one day,” Henry told his version as he turned his head around to the direction of his chamber, and then back to Montjoy. Faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled. It barged in unannounced, sprung on Montjoy like one of those gusts that clear through obstacles and threw open all doors and windows, stirring everything along their path with the hasty familiarity of people who, when it came to other people, couldn't care less and haven't a thing to lose. “Before I'm dead.”

Talk, and then silence, and talk, and all the while they were standing a few feet apart, sorrow addled his heart for someone he'd met decades elsewhere, a love most chaste. These were the words with which he marked time in that private little ledger where they measured what they've lost, where they failed, how they aged, why they got so little of what they longed for, and whether it was still wise to hold out for something as they sorted the life they've given to live, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, an the life they wished they'd learn to live while they still had time, and the life they wanted to rewrite if only they could, and the life they knew remain unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life they hoped others may live far better and more wisely than they had.

And suddenly everything that was unknown about him radiated from these six words, as though they were a pressing bulletin mysteriously scribbled but would only summon an evening when a dream, a would-be life, suddenly blossomed before them. It could be just that, a dream and nothing more, but it stirred so fierce a desire to be happy that Montjoy was almost ready to believe that. Supposed that the saddest thing for them, looking at each other in silence, was that neither of them wanted to say: _this is a story we could live with , not the other one, that one was too painful, we could not survive it._

* * *

It was late and they were on the floor near the fireplace; what did they do that night? They must've walked wrapped around each other. Maybe not. Maybe eaten dinner that tasted like a wedding feast. Maybe they didn't see each other for a whole day until now. It would've been good to have laid down there and made love under the moon, happy colts, flagrant like rabbits, dove-innocent in their pursuit of pleasure, but the truth was that, everything was an itchy business. Neither of them thought about it and they had no time to discuss it. The time they had they used. Those brief days and briefer hours were small offerings to a god who wouldn't be appeased by burning flesh. Right now she had a life inside of her and not just in metaphorical sense. Their child. Half him, half her. But before the child, they consumed each other and went hungry again, with patches of relief, moments of tranquility as still as an artificial lake but always behind them the roaring tide.

>   
>  _I ache for you._   
>  _Do people still ache for people?_   
>  _Not really._   
>  _Then speak differently._

Henry slept with his head resting on her lap. She looked down at his face and slowly, with as little disruption as possible, brought her palms together and cupped his cheeks between them. Of the visions that came to her waking and sleeping the most insistent was his face. His face, mirror-smooth and mirror-clear. His face under the moon, silvered with cool reflection, his face in its mystery, revealing her. She held him as Death would hold him. Death that slowly pulled down the skin's heavy curtain to expose the bony cage behind: the skin loosened, yellowed like limestone worn by time, showed up the marbling of veins. The pale translucency hardened and grew cold. The bones themselves yellowed into tusks. His face gored her. She was run through. Into the holes she packed splinters of hope but hope did not heal her.

She wasn't clear which had come first, the thought or the gesture, or whether both weren't braided in the same movement, spiraling around the three words she was about to say to the dead of the night, like frisky death threats masquerading as meaningless jab. “You're a pit,” She whispered. “You're a pit that good things fall into.”

* * *

He hated being a nobody. He has had to live out some of other people's unlived life. Not that he really has any choice, not with its flamboyant theatricality. And he was thinking, as voices went in and out like the sea: _why aren't you proud of me?_ He knew he was a fool, hoping dirt and glory were both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that lighten them up. He saw like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammered at his head. But how else to live, vertical that he was, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? He cannot assume people would understand him. It was just as likely that as he invented what he wanted to say, they would invent what they wanted to hear.

> _Sometimes, I feel sad for no apparent reason. Does this happen to you? _  
>  _Not particularly, I don't think. I used to worry when I was kid._   
> _ Worry? _  
>  _Yes, like I would worry about insignificant things. Some people, strangers, might worry me. I had trouble sleeping. I'd get stomachaches._   
> _ How old were you then? _  
>  _Young. Maybe five, six. When it would get bad, I'd go to my mother and we'd sit and talk._   
> _ About what? _  
>  _Usually about what I'd been worried about._   
> _ Do you remember anything specific? _  
>  _I never worried about dying, but I did worry about people in my family dying. Mostly it was abstract fears. For a while I worried one of my limbs might fall off._   
> _ I can see how that might be unnerving. _  
>  _Sorry. That was a very long answer to your question. So to answer, I would say that no, I'm not melancholic._   
> _ But sad? _  
>  _Sure._   
> _ Why is that--how is that different? _  
>  _One is physically painful, debilitating. The other one is no different from happiness._

And then he thought about life before/life after. The lifeless, hollow, stop gap/the thrilling, scary, mirage of water beyond a valley of rattlesnakes. It was sort of a nebulous, patchy memory. Would he still feel this way on leaving France later? Or would he find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so that they'd start to bother him and allow him to snuff the dream until it tapered off and lost its luster and remind him once again, as ever again, that happiness was the only thing in their lives others couldn't bring.

The wrong play. The wrong script. It should've been the moment where he talked about what he could do and would the other man hate him and yes he knew the other man would hate him and there were no question marks in the speech because it should've been a fait accompli.

_Be careful /I am careful_. Cling. Pain upwards. Pain downwards. What corner of Henry's insect world did pain not possess? The walls were smeared with it, sticky, slightly sweet. Pain was as total as a lover. Death was as obscene. The pictures in his head were sex and sex. His body. Her body. _His_ body. Unseparated, twisting, dark. The grinning collusion of skulls boned in lust. The silent gravity-gone somersault. He knew they were falling, all three, but the ground was still a long way off—might as well take it as Henry's turn to bring one more person to free fall with them.

* * *

This story was about many of things, mostly about fools. It was so very easy to declare other people's idiocy, yet people failed to remember how moronically troublesome being human was. Particularly when you had others you were attempting to be a sensibly decent person for. Because there was an incredible sum of everything that we were supposed to do. Some people never figured out how to get the mayhem leveled out, so their lives became luggage, portable, the world turned through space at two million miles an hour while they bobbed about on its surface. The second someone unwind, they floated off and began to look all starry eyed at and got broken, all in the blink of an eye. It came to the realisation that none of us were in charge. So we figured out how to imagine, constantly, about our positions and our relationships and our children and everything else. We imagined we were ordinary, that we were sensibly accomplished, even when none of us had an arrangement, simply put forth a valiant effort to overcome the day, on the grounds that there would be another coming tomorrow. Here and there it harmed, it truly harmed, for no other explanation than the way that our skin didn't feel like it was our own. Since everybody loved somebody, and anyone who loved somebody had those frantic evenings where they were wide awake in the dead of the night trying to sort out how they could stand to continue being human being. Now and again that caused people to do things that appeared to be strange, but it felt like the only way out at the time. Because they needed to get out from the cruel and menace. But how did you know when something was menacing? What cued us that something wasn't innocent? One single truly foolish decision. That was all it took. Maybe she should've simply enjoyed this, not overthink it. Get out of her own head, let things happened naturally, whatever the latter one meant.

He once asked: _why do I frighten you?_

Frighten her?

Yes, he did frighten her. Henry the Fifth was gloriously wounded, like a martyr, gouged and dripping for God, and he dragged his cross for all to see. After all, in End Time, this vestibule existence of life on earth could only be a succession of losses. Maybe he was right, or the scholars were right, or the romantics and religious who were right. Might as well ride along. Like shells on the beach that held echoes of the sea. Yet, even then if either of them rushed at this, it was because they fear for it. They feared either one of them had a door the other one couldn't see and that any minute now the door would open and the other one would be gone.

Then what?

Then what as she banged the walls like the Inquisition searching for a saint? Where would she find the secret passage? This was natural. She wasn't going to prevent doubts from blooming. Wouldn't that be more unnatural?

She asked herself what her reasons were for thinking these thoughts and had trouble coming up with anything substantial. It got to a certain point and just soured, not inducing sickness but enough to notice a change in flavour. Maybe instead of wondering about Henry, she should be questioning her ability to experience passion. This could all be her fault.

* * *

>   
>  _  
> And do you feel anything now? Because right now I feel absolutely none. _  
> _I know you don’t. _  
> _How do you know? _  
> _Because I just do. _  
> _You don’t miss a beat, do you? _  
> _No. But then that’s why you like me? _  
> _Remind me never to have anything to do with men who never miss a beat. _  
> _When do I start reminding you? _  
> _Start now. No, not now. Now is too lovely and I’m having such a good time. _

He thought about what he had said to Montjoy before. He didn't answer, and Henry didn't ask further. But he was gazing at Henry the way God gazed at Adam and he was embarrassed by the look of love and possession and pride. He wanted to go now, into the dark, and cover himself with fig leaves. Sin this not being ready, this not being up to it. Maybe he should wait until Montjoy was off guard and then told Montjoy that he didn't mean any of the words he said. Henry would watch the confusion and upset. Maybe the tears. And then he'd ran off, triumphantly in control; leaked away.

> _You will learn. You will understand me better after I am dead. You will see what you will do to protect the things you love. You will be horrified by what you’ll do. And you will do it anyway. _  
> _I will never be like you. _  
> _Then you will fall. _

Would that be what he'd want? Just him doing his usual letting-go-of-what-I-want-most because the things he craved were so rarely given that he seldom believed it when they were, won't dare touch, and without knowing, turned them down. Looking back, Montjoy's nonexistent answer still showed how fragile everything was. Brisk and lightly crafted, for a second he'd forget how disappointingly brief their time was and how deceptive straight talk could sometimes be. In Henry's attempt to reach out and say something real and close to the heart, he was simultaneously eliding the one thing Henry craved to hear the most.

Montjoy wasn't curt, or shifty, or chatty nor was there anything _bland_ or tame in everything and nothing he said. In fact, Montjoy was bold. But there never was a hint of something else in what he said, no subtext, no allusion, no parapraxis asking to be mulled over and dissected, no nickel inadvertently dropped on the table for Henry to raise. All clarity and transparency, no hidden corners, no false trails, no dead ends. Reading so much into it would've been reading Henry's own pulse, not his. Perhaps Montjoy really was the untrammeled sort who dropped into your life as easily as he sprang out of it, a typical herald that was: no baggage, no promise of his own, no hard feelings. Everything had an unmistakable air of suppressed haste, like he could've said more, much more, but why bore Henry with details. And perhaps the normal mix of anxiety and irony which tripped so many of them when they met someone new.

But Montjoy never said: _too soon, too sudden, too fast._ Maybe they were not so different after all. Everything about them was transient and provisional, as if fate wasn’t done experimenting on them and couldn’t decide what to do next. But there was a difference: one was the control in the experiment; the other one the experimented-on. One was given the placebo, the other the real medicine. Neither of them belonged, but one was still the nomad, the other had a ground to stand on. One saw the precipice every day of his life, the other never had to look down that deep. There was always a fence or a hedge to block the view; they had run out of all partitions. But there was another difference between them: one knew how to wiggle his way around the precipice; the other, however, put him right between the precipice and himself. Perhaps each other's was the life they were desperate to try out.

So?

So, nothing. He knew he was a fool trying to make connections out of scraps but how else was there to proceed? The fragmentariness of life made coherence suspect but to babble was a different kind of treachery. Perhaps it was a vanity. Was he vain enough to assume Montjoy would understand him? No. So, he went on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that next time one piece would slide smooth against the next. He wanted to feel sorry for himself, wanted to feel sorry for always wanting, wanting, wanting, and never knowing what to do or where to go beyond wanting.

Walk with him. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if they pulled away the panelling then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How would he come to read the rawness inside?

He was wide awake thinking he had lost him because every night felt it could be his last, and all he did here, without even knowing he was doing it, was pray the day never came when he won't have been without the other one. Perhaps all he wanted was to sit and think, and think of nothing, sink into himself, dream, find all things beautiful, and, as he’d never allowed himself to do during the entire evening, to long for other people, the way we longed for someone we knew we didn’t stand a chance of meeting again, or of meeting on the exact same terms, but were all the same determined to long for; filled the heart. The way absence and sorrow and mourning filled the heart. He didn’t know what all this meant, nor did he trust himself with this, but as he mused over these stray thoughts, he didn’t move, as though something timeless and solemn was taking place. He kept thinking that perhaps there was no reason to bank on anything. Nothing had happened or, if it had, it hovered in mid-sleep awhile and then vanished in the wee hours of the night without a trace. Weren't they both pretending it was dream neither was sure the other hadn't dreamed? A growing sense of alarm seized him as soon as he realised that this thing he'd been incubating all week without telling anyone was no better than a bubble that the slightest quizzical glance could puncture.

So?

So, had he lost Montjoy? Was he losing him right now by wasting his ration of time with him? Or was he always ready losing him because in the end, Henry was in a state of perpetual furlough, hence on borrowed time, in hock? Stabs of time really tormented him. His life seemed to be made up of dark matter that pushed out of easy unconsciousness so that he stop and stumble, unable to pass smoothly as other people did. He should like to ramble over the past as if it were a favourite walk. Walk with him, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view; walk with him. The past in wait, not behind but seemed to be in front. How else could it tripped him as he started to run?

In the dead of the night he stared up at nothingness, wondering what should he do now. Stand and wait? Stand and wonder? What to do, what to do. And it would be the sound of fire crackling that would break the silence. _Did you expect guidance, Harry? An answer? An apology? Let that be a lesson, that’s the good that comes from wanting things._ The voice was really good at dispensing life lessons that always seemed to circle back to everything being his fault.

 _His patience would wear you out_ , the voice inside his head told him. The same voice that whispered the false memories into someone's head. _Everything about you—your silence, your tact, your fucking restraint, and the way you give him slack, hoping he doesn't notice. You won’t find love, he won’t find it in you, for you, with anyone. Which is why you’re in his way._

 _Go back_ , the voice would say. If he could go back, if only he could go back. Some story they must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting was very small. The lure of it was immense. They hoped to collide. They fell in love.

In the dead of the night footsteps were heading towards him. He turned. Someone called his name and he smiled. He knew that voice among millions.

* * *

**Coda.**

The days were lost to her now. But when night came, Catherine found herself alone. She moved silently through as if she were still a child with much to hide. The nursery was on the far side of the west wing. She slipped inside and without breathing, Catherine peeked over the side. The baby blinked up at her. His eyes were pensive, as if he could understand the significance of this moment. He balled his tiny hand into a fat little fist and offered it up to her. Then he smiled.

She tapped his fist with her index finger.

“Hello,” she whispered. “I’m your mother. It’s not a very good deal for you, I’m afraid.”

He giggled and held out both his arms to her. Without even thinking about it, she picked him up, wrapping him in his thick blanket. “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said piteously. He popped a spit bubble and settled into her arms. He was the lightest and the heaviest thing she had ever held. “It will be different for you,” she swore to him, brushing his wispy curls with her palm. “I’ll make sure that it’s different.” He grabbed hold of her finger and shook it up and down.

>   
> “And I’ll tell you all about your name. Someday, I’ll tell you all about everything.”

He smiled, stretching out his toes, and then his eyes closed and he went still, save for the little chest rising and falling. She laid him back down in his crib and left, knowing there was only one place for her to go. The nights were precious to her now. And this night, she found herself in the garden, staring up at a sky. Though she wore nothing but a nightgown, she was not cold. She looked up at the moon. Tonight, she felt large enough to snatch it from its perch and wear it around her neck like a pearl. She tucked this feeling away in her box of happy memories. Later, when she was feeling weak, she would call on it to make her strong. Her perch was wet. And tomorrow, or the day after, it would likely do so again. She knew that this could not last for long. She did not know what kind would come, but she knew that it would. And she knew that she would survive it. The wind rustled, and she could swear she heard a knowing laugh. Though it was the middle of a December night, her skin was fiercely warm, kissed by an unseen fire. And it was in these rare moments that she felt it: the burning light of her sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the fun part about this story: read Catherine's story in reverse first and then Henry/Montjoy's in usual order.
> 
> So when I got the prompt, I had pretty clear idea this would be how I structured the story, going back and forth between Henry and Catherine, with one of their story be in reverse narrative. What I didn't expect was their ambiguous endings (and in Catherine's case, I guess her ending is technically the very opening of this story). I always like the idea of writing 'the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end' story where it doesn't have to feel final, so I tried to incorporate that into this story. 
> 
> Anyway, I know I'm supposed to write a smutty, happy-for-all fic, and I have open ending that implies it ends well. At least for now, for a couple of them. But of course this story is not without some sex talk ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯三三ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
> 
> That being said, I do thoroughly enjoy writing this and I'm sorry that it ended up being super depresso. I hope all of you enjoy this as much as I enjoy writing it.


End file.
